Here's the foreword to the G.O.T.H.S. book

[this is the foreword to the G.O.T.H.S. book, which is available now at Amazon and Smashwords, includes revised and expanded versions of the essays from the previous year, and one essay that will be posted on on the site on 10/14. All proceeds will go to three activist groups working to change the Catholic church; I will also send you a free electronic copy if you donate to one of those groups. If you're a newsletter subscriber, I'll be doing a giveaway of a few print copies in a couple of weeks.]

First and foremost, this is a work of anger. I started writing it as a response to the failure of my church to respond to serious moral crises in our country, especially our treatment of immigrants and the poor. While I had seen wonderful involvement from other faith traditions in my activism work, and while my own faith life had informed my decisions to become more involved in activism, including for labor and immigrant rights, I didn’t see the same institutional support from Catholicism, and instead just saw a bunch of old men reeling from another sexual abuse scandal and just saying the same shit over and over again about how abortion was the only thing that mattered and we had to listen to them on that if we wanted to be “good” Catholics.

So while I was dicking around on Twitter one day, I found a priest who was selling “Make America Holy Again” hats and tried to figure out what his deal was, how someone who went to seminary and worked as a pastor could be such a full-throated supporter of everything that was happening. And then his story turned out to be a whole lot weirder than I thought.

I wrote about 8,000 words on him, originally as a podcast script for a project I called Awful Catholic People, then Shiny Angry People, then Our Lady of Perpetual Grift, and then it became a written piece with a name that reduced to a much funnier acronym. I then researched some other more famous weirdos in Catholicism to put a series together. But I was angry the whole time, so I swore a lot in my writing, and the pieces would sometimes go on weird tangents as I found other weird sources in my research, and throughout all of the pieces I mocked these men repeatedly. 

More importantly, though, I started writing these before a global pandemic started, and before we got to see which members of the hierarchy thought it was all a hoax created to destroy the church. I started writing these before prolonged Black Lives Matter protests erupted nationally, and we got to see who in the church was willing to continue American Catholicism’s proud tradition of institutional racism. I started writing these before I discovered the ecosystem of right-wing Catholic jank on the internet, and before Taylor Marshall started working on the Trump reelection campaign, and before Abby Johnson spoke at the RNC, and before Amy Coney Barrett got nominated to an open Supreme Court seat, and before Sohrab Ahmari started tweeting out his murder fantasies. And I started writing these before the President of the United States declared himself the greatest president in the history of the Catholic church, or retweeted a conspiracy theory about a “deep church” made up of evil pagan bishops dedicated to opposing him.

So in addition to being a work of anger, G.O.T.H.S. turned into an interesting snapshot of a very specific period in the relationship between the American church and right-wing politics, winding through Catholic and mainstream reporting, bishops’ documents, even court decisions and law review articles. But it also wound through self-published PDFs, blogging canon lawyers, low-budget anti-abortion propaganda films, endless YouTube interview shows, janky merch websites, and in one case a very bad country album. The story of the Catholic church in the Trump era is an infuriating one, but it’s often very darkly funny.

Still, it’s a work of anger first and foremost.  Is this work held to the most rigorous of journalistic standards? No. But is it a powerful new way to write theology in this unprecedented era? Also no. But did I try my best to present a balanced, unbiased opinion of each of these subjects? Again, no. But will it convince the reactionary wing of our church to change its ways? Definitely not. I’m one guy who felt let down by his church and tried to find out how it got this way. And my only qualification for doing that is that I'm baptized, but in my estimation, that qualification means something.

I don’t want to tell you that you should or shouldn’t feel angry about what is going on in the Catholic church in 2020. But I do want to tell you that if you are angry, you’re not alone. If you are angry, there are a lot of other Catholics that are angry right now too. If you are angry, there have been countless Catholics throughout the history of the church that have been angry at the failures of the church as an institution, and some of them ended up becoming saints. And if you are angry, I hope that learning more about the people who are behind the failures of the church helps us direct our anger towards addressing these problems and building a better church.

This book includes all of the “flagship” essays on notable Catholics in public life originally published on the G.O.T.H.S. newsletter, plus the brand-new essay on two very special members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The previously published essays have all been revised and expanded - in some cases, like Taylor Marshall and Abby Johnson, significantly expanded. In order to facilitate reading this on an e-reader or in a book, and in order to avoid any issues with ownership, I’ve removed all of the images and adjusted the essays to be more text-focused where applicable. The book also includes the “mini-G.O.T.H.S.” additional essays that were published sporadically on the newsletter, mostly focused on current events in the American Catholic church, and in some cases providing a quick look at other dumbshit Catholics in public life (Rusty Reno, Thomas Tobin, etc.).

G.O.T.H.S. never had a huge readership, and I never expected it to. But it had a very dedicated readership, of people who looked forward to new essays coming out, who would say nice things about them, who would share them with their friends. There were people - some of whom didn’t even know me personally! - who wanted to read stuff I had written, written exactly the way I liked to write, on topics that I got to pick. That is a blessing for any writer, and I am so grateful that I had that over the past year. 

This book is dedicated to those readers. Thank you for reading G.O.T.H.S. I hope you have found it helpful, or funny, or at the very least angry.

Tony Ginocchio

Chicago, 2020